Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated push. Can control of compute be far behind? It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision. I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
> Can control of compute be far behind? How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
Oh you sweet summer child :(
You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?
In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.
All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.
But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.
Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).
And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.
And magic happens.
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To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".
That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.
Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.
Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.
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Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?
What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?
Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?
Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.
There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.
Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.